Islands of Prosperity in a Slum Sea: The Impact of Public Housing on Urban Renewal in Memphis, Tennessee

Gail Radford’s Modern Housing for America (1997) and D. Bradford Hunt’s Blueprint for Disaster (2009) and his oral history collection undertaken with J.S. Fuerst, When Public Housing was Paradise (2005), began considering the roots of American public housing history.  Initiated in 1933 as a program of the Public Works Administration (PWA), America’s first public housing program forced officials to research, acquire and demolish portions of the under-serviced slum districts that surrounded most downtowns. Selecting sites and acquiring land required officials to make decisions based on their intuitive concepts of urban qualities, the disposition of current owners, and the dynamics that underlay the residential segregation patterns in cities across the nation.  PWA projects were among America's first efforts at urban renewal, defined as federally funded efforts to buy urban slum land and build new, large-scale uses. The language used by those acquiring the land revealed many things. Racial bias, firstly, but also a concept that the slum was akin to water, flowing, spreading, with eddies and tides. By eliminating a slum and constructing a new “island” of well-built, well-serviced and well-managed public housing, they hoped to create a healthy center for other substantial building projects to spread out from. In many cities, this effort was massively successful, if only because the new housing project then attracted the highways, hospitals, universities and other urban renewal projects that have contributed to the resurgence of the downtown in America in the last three decades. New hospital complexes built adjacent to two early housing projects in Memphis (Lauderdale Courts and Dixie Homes) have grown and public housing residents found themselves living adjacent to desirable areas. Ultimately, the public housing that spurred on subsequent development found itself priced out of the market, and both projects were significantly altered, and no longer accommodate an affordable housing use.